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Data Management: Are You Prepared for a Lawsuit?

CIOs can impose order on unstructured data and loose files that bedevil legal defense efforts.

Your company is named in a lawsuit and, as part of the discovery process, the plaintiff asks for all email correspondence and other data relating to one particular topic. With detailed inventories of data and applications, meeting the request might be a snap. Unfortunately, your company has neither. In fact, there are so many loose files hiding on laptops and on shared drives that no one really knows where to begin looking for the requested information.

“Many companies involved in litigation are hard-pressed to produce a responsive document set because much of their data is neither categorized nor inventoried,” says Sean Riley, a principal at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services, LLP. “The problem is only getting worse as data volumes grow.”

In the first installment of this two-part series, we examined ways CIOs can work with the records management and legal teams to streamline the e-discovery process. In this article, we identify three steps that CIOs can take right now to inventory and organize enterprise data in ways that may prove useful in the event of a lawsuit.

Inventory data by application. IT organizations typically maintain detailed inventories of all applications currently in use in the enterprise. These inventories—often created and managed by a software administrator—document, among other things, who uses the application, who within IT provides technical support for it, and which individuals or groups the application supports (e.g. bookkeeping software supports the accounting department). What these inventories do not typically include is a detailed description of the types of data contained within an application.

“By expanding an application inventory to include descriptions of data by record type, companies can create a fairly reliable index that can greatly facilitate the document searches and reviews that take place during litigation,” says Riley. “Once you have this document inventory, you can begin to weed out redundant or useless data that probably should have been deleted long ago.”

Archive important email and dump the rest. According to a recent study of corporate email practices, business users receive approximately 100 email messages per day. Of these, on average, 24 include an attachment.¹ As anyone with a company email address knows, very few of these messages are deleted in a timely manner. Rather, they molder in the inbox until they are automatically archived. Many of these messages serve no business purpose—think lunch invitations, emoticon replies, spam—and yet, because they are archived, legal teams will still be forced to review them as part of a discovery process.

According to Riley, CIOs can address this issue by crafting—and enforcing—email retention policies that enlist individual users in the battle against email buildup.

“Find ways to help individual users address the problem,” he says. “After all, they, more than anyone, know which messages in their inboxes are valuable and which are not.”

Riley says that one option would be to create a virtual file room that serves as a storage facility for valuable digital correspondence.

“Users could archive their important email there,” he says. “Then, IT could delete any unarchived email within the system that are older than 90 days. This could effectively reduce the volume of email data that legal must review during litigation.”

Create meaningful metadata. A major challenge legal teams often encounter in reviewing enterprise data is that many companies do not use metadata to identify and categorize documents and files. The net result is comparable to a library operating without the Dewey Decimal System—enterprise data becomes a disorderly mess in which individual items are impossible to find. According to Riley, many commonly used applications have metadata capabilities that, if used methodically, can help companies categorize and inventory new data.

“Many people don’t know this, but when you create a new document in Word, there are internal metadata fields in the document template. Too many organizations overlook these,” says Riley. “IT can be proactive by making applications automatically pre-fill this metadata for users when they create new content. This will make it possible to better categorize and group documents during legal review, which can speed up the entire process and ultimately, save the company money.”

About Deloitte Insights

Deloitte Insights for CIOs couples broad business insights with deep technical knowledge to help executives drive business and technology strategy, support business transformation, and enhance growth and productivity. Through fact-based research, technology perspectives and analyses, case studies and more, Deloitte Insights for CIOs informs the essential conversations in global, technology-led organizations. Learn more.

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